(Cross-listed as CPSC 013 )

This course explores the possibilities for creating computational resources for languages for which vast collections of text don't exist. Students will choose a language lacking in computational resources and develop tools for it. The focus will be on creating nuanced symbolic representations of the language that can be employed by computers, to the benefit of both language researchers who wish to test grammatical models, and language communities which lack the social capital to benefit from corporately developed resources. Topics covered include input methods and spell-checking, morphological analysis and disambiguation, syntactic parsing, building corpora, and rule-based machine translation, with an emphasis on anti-colonial methodologies and free/open-source technologies.

LING 001 (or equivalent) or CPSC 021 (or equivalent), or permission of the instructor.